A nurse who was among scores of Israelis abducted to Gaza says she spent her captivity in an underground tunnel, treating elderly fellow hostages, some hard of sight or hearing, with meager medical supplies for which she had to haggle with Hamas.

Nili Margalit was repatriated in a November truce between Israel and Hamas. Interviewed by local TV, she said Palestinian civilians had seized her from her village and “sold” her to Hamas who led the Oct 7 rampage.

Unaware that her father, along with some 1,200 other people, had been killed, Margalit, 41, was bundled barefoot into a stifling Hamas tunnel where, she says, hostages had been rounded up, bearing a variety of injuries from their rough handling.

“We were in a state of shock,” she told Channel 12 TV.

But using basic Arabic learned in the emergency room of a southern Israeli hospital that has Bedouin patients, Margalit informed the Hamas captors that she was a nurse. They agreed to her offer to take charge of the hostages’ medical needs.

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